In the excerpts from The Bob Zadek Show, the Democratic Party appears chiefly as one of the two American political parties whose character and conduct the program’s host and guests assess. The treatment is not a history of the party but a set of arguments about what the party is: a cultural-liberal coalition produced by realignment, in Lee Drutman’s account; a self-perpetuating monopoly in California, in Tom Campbell’s; and, on the question of the war on sex, an institution that is “not good” though less bad than the alternative, in Cathy Reisenwitz’s.
The party of cultural liberalism
Lee Drutman, discussing his book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, attributes the current party configuration to the nationalization of politics and the long realignment of the parties after the civil rights era. In that process, he says, the Democratic Party became the party of cultural liberalism and the Republican Party became the party of cultural conservatism Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop (2020). Drutman dates the culmination to the 2010s, with origins in the culture-war politics of the 1990s, and identifies the Gingrich revolution as the moment Congress changed hands after forty years of prior divided government. He describes the earlier period, from roughly the mid-1960s to about 1992, as containing a multi-party system inside the two-party frame: liberal Republicans who were somewhat more libertarian, particularly on social issues, and conservative Democrats who were somewhat more populist. That arrangement, he argues, allowed different coalitions to form issue by issue rather than breaking down into a binary. Both species went extinct over the 1990s and 2000s, and by 2010, in his account, the country was left with conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, with everyone else forced to choose a side or conclude that nobody represented them.
Bob Zadek responds to this account by recalling the Blue Dog Democrats, whom he describes as Democrats from the South who often voted with Republicans on certain issues. He connects their latitude to weaker party-leadership control of House voting in the last half of the twentieth century: Southern Democrats with longevity, and therefore committee chairs, could vote differently from Northern Democrats and still survive within the party. Zadek contrasts that with what he calls lockstep voting now, which he attributes to nationalized politics and rigid leadership control through institutional tools Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop (2020).
The California monopoly
Tom Campbell, a former Congressman, State Senator, and law and business school dean, tells Bob Zadek that economics teaches that monopoly is inefficient and results in less output and less opportunity, and that applying that learning to government reveals a self-perpetuating monopoly. In California, he says, the dominant political party insists that candidates adhere to an orthodoxy that does not admit sensible other points of view, and that party is the Democratic Party. He states that the monopoly party holds 77.5% of the Assembly and 75% of the State Senate, and every state office, while the Republican Party has become, in his judgment, largely irrelevant — a check that the majority party once had to consider, now gone Restoring Common Sense to California (2021).
Campbell cites a Public Policy Institute of California poll of registered voters finding that 56% of Democrats said a third party was needed because they felt shut out even of their own party, along with 53% of Republicans and 75% of independents. He describes the Common Sense Party as a party for the rest of us. On the mechanics of California elections, he says that before the top-two primary, Democrats ran in their own primary and Republicans in theirs, so the most active elements — to the left in the Democratic Party and to the right in the Republican Party — won nominations for a large or dominant part of the seats, producing a legislature composed of those extremes. As a Congressman, he recalls, the California delegation included Bob Dornan and Maxine Waters, people from the far right and the far left, which made it difficult for members to find something to work on together. He notes registration figures of 46% Democratic, 24.1% Republican, and 23.7% independent, with independents or no-party-preference voters having at times been higher in registration than Republicans Restoring Common Sense to California (2021).
Campbell’s strategic aim is to identify seven Assembly districts out of eighty where an independent-minded candidate can win, which would bring the monopoly party below two-thirds. He explains that as long as the party holds two-thirds, it can put ballot initiatives to amend the Constitution to change Prop 13 without paying to gather signatures, and can raise taxes without the people’s approval. Zadek frames the same structure in antitrust terms, saying that if the same arrangements existed in business the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Act would come down on them and the FTC would be on their back, and that the barrier to entry for a new political party is infinitely stronger than for a business. Zadek also argues that the two major parties are not held together by a set of principles, that the extreme elements of each party control through the primary system, and that the more centrist majority who identify as Democrats or Republicans are effectively orphans Restoring Common Sense to California (2021).
The war on sex
In a discussion of the war on sex, Bob Zadek asks Cathy Reisenwitz whether one political party gets it right more often than the other, noting that neither party has an underlying philosophy and that they try to assemble positions on enough issues to reach 50.1% of the popular vote. Reisenwitz answers that as the war on drugs ramps down, the war on sex is ramping up, and that by “we” she means Republicans for the most part. She cites sixteen states having declared porn a public health emergency, none of them blue states; politicians talking about new laws and funding for stings for sex trafficking tending to be Republicans rather than Democrats; and the Utah legislature passing a law requiring every device sold in the state to have a porn filter installed and turned on by default. She concludes that Republicans are definitely worse on the war on sex than Democrats are The War on Sex (2022).
She adds that Democrats are not good: SESTA-FOSTA was introduced, she believes, by Kamala Harris and definitely championed by her, with a lot of Democrats on board, and Democrats participate in sex trafficking moral panicking. She also says that of the legislators submitting sex work decriminalization bills, all of them are Democrats as far as she can tell, and summarizes that both parties are terrible and the Republicans are worse The War on Sex (2022).
Across episodes
The excerpts show no development in the treatment of the Democratic Party across the three episodes; each touches the topic from a different angle. The 2020 episode with Lee Drutman addresses the party’s realignment into the party of cultural liberalism, the 2021 episode with Tom Campbell addresses the Democratic Party as California’s monopoly party, and the 2022 episode with Cathy Reisenwitz addresses Democratic legislators’ record on sex work decriminalization and related legislation. No speaker in a later episode responds to or revises an earlier episode’s characterization.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the Democratic Party’s founding, its national organization, its platform, or its history before the civil rights era beyond the realignment narrative Drutman gives. They do not name the specific bills, cases, or amendments behind the claims about SESTA-FOSTA, the Utah porn-filter law, or the California two-thirds threshold, and they do not state the outcome of any of those measures. The Campbell excerpt breaks off mid-sentence as he begins to enumerate the Common Sense Party’s five principles, so the principles themselves are not in the sources. No excerpt states the date of any election, the full text of any statute, or the title of any case.